>Is it too complicated now? Perhaps. It is also new, on the bleeding edge. While I am not buying into all of the MS marketing crap, I am willing to be optimistic. Why? Because the development community will find a way to make the stuff work. The development community got COM to a decent level and I think the Developer Community will rise to the occasion here.

You're probably right, but when you start from scratch, as a tool vendor you should avoid having to wait for developers to catch up. If you build new tools one of the goals of the design I would see is to make it as easy as possible to accomplish things even if that means building additional class hierarchies on top of the base interfaces to provide that functionality. That way the developer has the choice between high and low level. It's a little hard for me today in this environment of developer shortage to justify a tool that will require buttloads of *more* code to be written to accomplish the same task that you could accomplish before.

I guess it depedns on perspective. If you come from a C++ background I suppose you get less code. But VB and certainly VFP programmers are looking at much more work...

>Given the bet MS has placed on .Net, I don't think failure is an option. Whether .Net's architecture is misguided or not is another issue all-together.

As I mentioned in the last message architecture-wise I think .Net is well done. The languages themselves are fine, and the concept of a common runtime is a good one - learn once, code in many of them <s>... My beef is with the Java mindset of the CLR... <g>

A lot of us in the MS camp of developers have stuck with Microsoft against the Java tide over the years even though that was the hip thing to do and certainly the place were you can overcharge customers. Now after all the Java bashing MS did over the years the CLR and C# come along - basically a Java clone. You gotta laugh at the irony of that...

Now there's nothing left to do but learn it, right? Choice's gone... you can stick it out with the existing technology and continue to work with that and it will fit the bill for most things still even after .Net. But you better have a plan B and at least be familiar with .Net because at the very least you'll have to interact with it in the future...


+++ Rick ---